Many applications, which were once thought to be nothing but science fiction, are now available on reasonably powerful computers. For example, speaker independent voice recognition can be run on a computer which has a sufficiently large processing capability, and in fact is being used by some companies for certain telephone applications. The computer running the recognition often uses a database of templates to match incoming words to their recognized counterparts. Algorithms for recognizing such information on a speaker independent basis have improved over time. However, significant computer resources are still needed to carry this out.
A trend in the art has been to make computers smaller and “thinner”, e.g. to reduce the computing power. This is often done in small computers such as a personal digital assistant (PDA) or a portable telephone or a cell phone or a miniaturized computer. In today's world, many of the high resource-intensive applications, such as speaker independent voice recognition, cannot be effectively run on a thin computer such as a personal digital assistant. The hardware necessarily to do this effectively will undoubtedly get smaller and cheaper. Therefore, smaller computers may be able to do these functions in the future. However, by that time, more applications, with more computation-intensive needs, will be available.
No matter what happens, it is believed by the inventor of the present invention that there will always be applications that need to be run on a desktop computer that cannot be properly run on a thin client such as a PDA.
Perhaps the ultimate thin client is one which only allows sending commands to another more robust server, and does not itself have any computing power.